Glass Half Broken
by waterlit
Summary: They try to keep their love alive, futilely so, for they were never meant to be anything but solitary vessels. AllenLenalee.


Disclaimer: I own nothing (:

* * *

Lenalee sits in front of the mirror and practises her smile; her face is tight and her eyes are drooping and heaven knows why anymore. _The war has taken a toll on you_, they say consolingly, _everything will become better, in the end._

And so it will. Lenalee uses her fingers to push her lips upwards into the ghost of a smile. Her lips contort into the frown of the whittled moon and she grimaces; she blossoms with weariness. She only hopes Allen will look past the glum features resting on the blank sheet of her face.

But Allen merely walks past her with a sheepish smile, before tossing himself onto the bed. She follows, crawling into bed and locking her arms tight around herself. She wants to reach out for Allen, but she can't see him, in the darkness that falls gently around them.

No words pass between them, and a withering sea stakes its path between their discrete bodies.

She feels like the bed might collapse from all that tension and that her insides may just cave inwards and succumb – at long last – to the empty valleys of despair embedded within the soft tissue mesh of her heart.

[[]]

Allen slides his head on the pillow, from left to right, left to right and back again; there she is, queen of his heart and love of his life, and all he can do is lie with his back to her and his eyes closed and his ears open to the sound of her soft heartbeats.

The darkness weighs on him; he writhes and turns his back to the ceiling.

He wants to reach out and hold Lenalee's hand, but he can't. There is a wall between them, an invisible but always-there wall that distracts him and drives him crazy, but he is unable to tear it down.

_Why this strange wall_, he wonders, _why, oh why?_ He touches the silver band around his ring finger, sighs, and turns back onto his side. His heart beats, faster and faster, but he wants to know that he's tried.

[[]]

Allen walks Lenalee to the altar and holds her hand and drinks deep of her liquid eyes; a thousand and one other clichés follow after on the measly trail to eternity. The order stands; the members clap, clap , clap…

Clap.

And the claps resound; the bride and the groom walk down the aisle, hand in hand. The trumpets blow and the choir sings and all Allen can think _is this, is this really what I want?_

He looks at Lenalee, pickled in white frills and glazed with sweet-smelling creams and he bottles love and tries to distil the warm prickling of his heart into passionate palpitations. He smiles and cuts the wedding cake, toasting her with bitter, ash-filled wine (the wine glass is half-filled) which he tosses over his shoulder when no one is looking.

Lenalee smiles at the cake and thinks of a time when she was young and no one remembered her birthday and who knew where her brother was and when the only thing she could see was a dark canopy above her little-girl head, with dark metal rings stitched to her arms and legs. The clanking of those pretty rings held her still, alone in her quiet world, and anchored her down into the deep.

Those days are long over now, and she has Allen to love and to love her now. Besides the whole world, that is. When the newly-weds go to bed that night, they are drunk and tipsy and fall into sweet slumber under the embracing embrace of their bed.

[[]]

Allen has always lived for the world. Above all, his duty is to the Akuma and to the living; for them he wields his sword and dons his robes.

Once in a memory of distant tears Mana died and left him all alone, all alone alone alone in the big, bad world. But the dust of the flowing years has stilled the pain and stoked his flame. Now he lives each day as best as he can. The Akuma come and go, and the shrieks and terrifying screams of sorrow latch onto his heart and lock it up with keys later strung among the clouds.

_Walk on, Allen_, Mana had told him once, _you must walk on_.

_Walk on,_ he tells himself, _I will walk on and fulfil my promise to Mana_.

He discards the Fourteenth from his thoughts and holds his hand to his heart. _I will never stop fighting_, he promises himself, _I will destroy time and bring an end to the evils that plague this world. I will cleanse the souls of the Akuma and send them to heaven_.

[[]]

"Will you marry me, Lenalee?" Allen went on his knees, his warm hands holding hers.

"I will, Allen-kun." She sobbed into his coat after pulling him up.

_It was a weepy winter. _

He tried to clasp his arms around her small waist, and he did, but the space between them seemed only to enlarge with every movement he made to pull her closer.

She buried her face in his exorcist coat, and pelted it with tears of joy, but when she pulled away, his coat was desert-dry and cold and empty and she felt a lone tear trickling out her eye.

[[]]

Lenalee's world means everything to her. Without the puzzle-pieces that constitute the fibres of her being, she would never be able to live on as a complete, whole person.

"Coffee?" She walks into the Science Division, a smile (the usual) on her face.

_Yes please_, the scientists say, and they reach out for the mugs. Like a mother she dishes out the coffee as if she were dishing out bowls of warm beef soup and smiles upon them with jewelled eyes. Her heart bleeds as they sip the odorous beverage, and she shivers, as only a mother can. The world stands on its toes, and fear trips on end, and here she stands,

stands,

and wonders if she has enough thread to stitch their wounds close again. But the days are long and her hands are lean, and the fear presses on her and picks her seams apart at night. She knows now, she thinks, how a war widow feels, writhing with condensed worry each night as she thinks of how best to feed her hungry children, because there's nothing left in the pantry but a lone cabbage and a handful of sand-dusted rice.

Not that the Order is low on food supplies; it isn't. But Lenalee sighs and smiles at the scientists and wonders how long more she can fight for them.

[[]]

Once in a memory of war he came close to death (one of so many instances). Rhode was there, taunting, hinting and cruelly twisting their arms behind their tattered backs. _Self-destruct_, she told an accompanying akuma, licking the candle with Allen's blood on it.

He jumped into the explosion with nary a thought.

Perhaps, perhaps, that says something about how he has always known that he is ready to die for the world. His hand strokes Lenalee's hair gently; he wants to comb out the tears and the fears and bring her into utopia.

His heart beats softly, and the world spins on its axis. He is awake, and ready to guard it. He will never abandon humanity and the akuma, even if Lenalee deals him a hundred slaps. The world is his to protect.

[[]]

And this is the World, Lavi tells Lenalee, waving the card before her face. It speaks of hearts too deep to be filled and of love withered by relentless depth. _Fear death by grief,_ Lavi smirks, and he winks at the ring on her finger.

Lenalee wants to grasp his red locks and pull some out because of his words, but it's all she can do to fight the wave of tears upon the mention of the word _death_.

Death is nothing to her; to an exorcist, death is all in a day's work. But when the darkness flashes before her eyes – printed under her lids and hovering constantly at the outskirts of memory, and the darkness creeps under the curtains and slides between her and Allen and she can't reach out for the candle, then it hits her hard. There's never been anything more certain about it.

Her world – she will die protecting them if she must. She shivers as she remembers a moontide battle where she fought against one Eshii, drenched to the skin with sea-spray and fear and doused in love.

She will rise again from her perch and stop the pendulum from swinging if she has to.

_Tick tock _

_Tick tock_

_Where to stop? _

_I won't stop_, she tells herself, _I will fight for my world_.

Allen's face surfaces, and she wonders, as she tries to grasp a piece of him, if fate was really what threw them together.

[[]]

Night falls again, stealing softly over the ancient crevices and hallways. A mission report lies strewn on the desk; Allen and Lenalee are draped in the shadows of dusk.

The candle burns bright at the door, and Allen turns Lenalee away and kisses her whole on the lips.

The night burns deep, and they fumble with their clothes and toss their rings onto the desk and fulfil each other with moans and groans and sighs. Allen fills her up, but Lenalee deflates like a broken glass, and emptiness swells within her heart.

Hollow sighs ricochet within his abdomen, and he arches his back and tries to keep the wine within the glass. But Lenalee sinks down, down, down, and the wine flows out, blood-red with the scent of decay.

They run their fingers through tattered hair, and kiss; Lenalee tries to fill Allen up, but he makes her empty once again.

[[]]

They were never meant to be anything but solitary vessels.

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A/N: I... can imagine the :O faces that you'd have if you've read thus far. This ficlet is somewhat vague and confusing, imo. I'll explain as best I can: it's basically about how Allen and Lenalee love each other, but find that their respective capacities for loving others and the world at large are so great that they have only the slightest spare bits left to love each other. At least, that was the basic premise on which I built this fic. So yeahh the main point is, I'm trying to say that their love is futile because it can never satisfy them. I hope this makes sense!

Heh hope you enjoyed this! I liked the part with Lenalee and Lavi. Fear death by grief was inspired by Eliot's poem The Waste Land. It's epic and awesome omg yes (:

Okay yeah I'll end here. Do review if you can! (: Otherwise, thanks for reading, all the same!


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